Why parent and child calendars? What's the purpose?

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Charlotte Ziems

November 17, 2020 20:15

Hey there--I'm an enterprise user so have access to creating Parent and Child calendars, but I'm confused as to why there's a difference. I currently group child calendar under a Parent calendar aligned to a type of content, e.g., parent calendar for Blog, Campaign Content, etc. with child calendar underneath. 

But a colleague wanted a "test calendar" so I created a "Test Calendar" parent and a "Dustin's calendar" as a child. Did I do that right?

Also, it's frustrating that you can't assign workflows to Parent calendars and have them populate to child calendars underneath them--but you can do that with Content Strategies and with Content Types. This leads me to believe that my child calendars under my Parent "Campaign Content" Calendar should be according to asset type instead of campaign program name--e.g., ebook, video, white paper vs. theme 1, theme 2, theme 3. How do other users set up calendars for campaign content and ensure each type of content has a separate workflow? Thanks

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• Official comment

  

  CHynek November 19, 2020 19:18 (Edited November 19, 2020 19:19)

  Thanks for the great question, Charlotte! For most companies, setting up their calendars is pretty straightforward as they likely have a well-defined organizational structure (people/teams) and a clear list of content properties, channels, and initiatives they manage every day. But it's not always that simple. We also have very large, complex organizations using Divvy and it took quite a bit of trial, error, and internal discussion to land on a calendar structure that fit the bill.
  
  With that in mind, here are a few key considerations and a few resources that might be helpful. And as you know, we're always available if a quick phone call/virtual screenshare is desired.
  
  Calendar hierarchy - Divvy has three levels of calendars:

  1. Global calendar view (a.k.a. Standard View) - this is your main calendar view that aggregates and displays all content, campaigns, etc.
  2. Parent calendars - a grouping of child calendars
  3. Child calendars - these manage the schedules of individual initiatives and house the actual content items/projects

  Here's a simple presentation deck that explains this in more depth (with visuals): https://bit.ly/2UBlMNr
  
  Now, since each company is unique, every company may choose to use our calendar hierarchy a little differently. Several years ago, we wrote a blog post that goes more in depth on this very thing: https://bit.ly/3nBqBm7
  
  But, the vast majority of our clients take a property/channel-based approach. Meaning, they list out all of their content properties and channels (a website, a blog, email, social, etc.) and set up child calendars for each. In a larger organization, the parent calendar level becomes really beneficial to this so that individual business units or departments can create their own parent calendar, and then create child calendars under that to manage their different initiatives.
  
  Parent calendars are also beneficial in that they allow you to specify certain settings and meta data that should propagate down to all children. We don't yet have workflow propagation in place. That is on our roadmap, however.
  
  We hope this provides more clarity on the differences and how to best establish a calendar organization that fits your situation. Again, we're only a phone call away if you or anyone ever wants to talk through possible scenarios

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